“Feel like shit,” was her cotton-mouthed reply.
She drank it greedily.
“I’ve seen worse,” he said.
She covered her face with her hands and rolled over, turning away from him, as
if embarrassed to be seen. A few minutes later, she asked, “Did you drive here
in the limo?”
“No. That’s still in Amsterdam. Don’t you remember?”
“We put a ‘bumper beeper’ on it,” she explained. Her eyes roamed across the
ceiling, which was covered by an elaborate baroque painting of cherubim
gamboling among clouds.
“I figured,” Janson said.
“Don’t want them to find us,” she whispered.
Janson touched her cheek gently. “Remind me how come.”
For a few moments she said nothing. Then she slowly sat up in the bed. Anger
settled onto her bruised countenance. “They lied,” she said softly. “They lied,”
she repeated, and this time there was steel in her voice.
“There will always be lies,” Janson said.
“The bastards set me up,” she said, and now she was trembling, with cold, or
with fury.
“No, I think I was the one being set up,” Janson said levelly.
He refilled her glass, watched her raise it to her cracked lips, drink the water
in a single swallow.
“Comes to the same thing,” she said. Her voice was distant. “When it’s your own
team does it to you, there’s only one word for it. Betrayal.”
“You feel betrayed,” Janson said.
She covered her face with her hand, and words came out in a rush. “They set me
up to kill you, but I don’t feel guilty, somehow. Mostly, I just feel … so
pissed off. So angry.” Her voice broke. “And so damn ashamed. Like a goddamn
dupe. And I’m starting to wonder about everything I think I know—what’s real,
what isn’t. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“Yes,” Janson said, simply.
She fell silent for a while. “You look at me like I’m some kind of wounded
animal,” she finally said.
“Maybe we both are,” Janson said gently. “And there’s nothing more dangerous.”
While the woman rested, Janson was downstairs, in the room that the house’s
owner, Alasdair Swift, used as a study. Before him was a stack of articles he
had downloaded from online electronic databases of newspapers and periodicals.
These were the lives of Peter Novak—hundreds of stories about the life and times
of the great philanthropist.
Janson pored over them obsessively, hunting for something that he knew he would
probably not find: a key, a clue, an incidental bit of data with larger
significance. Something—anything—that would tell him why the great man had been
killed. Something that would narrow the field. He was looking for a rhyme—a
detail that would be meaningless to most people, yet would resonate with
something that his subconscious mind had stowed away. We know more than we know,
as Demarest liked to say: our mind stores the impress of facts that we cannot
consciously retrieve. Janson read in a zone of receptivity: not trying to puzzle
out a problem but hoping simply to take in what could be taken in, without
preconception or expectations. Would there be a fleeting allusion to an
embittered business rival? To a particular current of buried animus in the
financial or international community? To a conflict involving his forebears?
Some other enemy as yet unsuspected? He could not know the kind of thing he was
looking for, and to imagine that he did would only blind him to the thing he
must see.
Novak’s enemies—was he flattering himself to think this?—were his enemies. If
that were so, what else might they have in common? We know more than we know.
Yet as Janson read on ceaselessly, his eyes beginning to burn, he felt as if he
knew less and less. Occasionally he underlined a detail, though what was
striking was how little the details varied. There were countless renditions of
Peter Novak’s financial exploits, countless evocations of his childhood in
war-torn Hungary, countless tributes to his humanitarian passions. In the Far
Eastern Economic Review, he read:
In December of 1992, he announced another ambitious program, donating $100
million in support of scientists of the former Soviet Union. His program was
designed to slow down that country’s brain drain—and prevent Soviet scientists
from taking up more lucrative employment in places like Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
There’s no better example of Novak in action. Even while Europe and the United
States were wringing their hands and wondering what to do about the dispersal of
scientific talent from the former superpower, Novak was actually doing something
about it.
“I find it easier to make money than to spend it, to tell you the truth,” says
Novak with a big grin. He remains a man of simple tastes.
Every day starts with a spartan breakfast of kasha, and he pointedly eschews the
luxury resorts and high-living ways favored by the plutocratic set.
Even Novak’s small, homey eccentricities—like that unvarying daily breakfast of
kasha—cycled from one piece to another: a permanent residue of personal “color,”
PCBs in the journalistic riverbed. Once in a while, there was a reference to the
investigation of Novak’s activities after Great Britain’s “Black Wednesday,” and
the conclusion, as summarized by the head of MI6, in the line that Fielding had
quoted: “The only law this fellow has broken is the law of averages.” In another
widely repeated quote, Peter Novak had explained his relative reticence with the
press: “Dealing with a journalist is like dancing with a Doberman,” he had
quipped. “You never know if it’s going to lick your face or rip your throat
out.” Testimonials from elder statesmen about his role in rebuilding civil
society and promoting conflict resolution were woven through every profile.
Soon, paragraphs of journalistic prose seemed to blend into one another; quotes
recurred with only minor variations, as if struck from boilerplate. Thus, the
London Guardian:
‘Time was you could dismiss Peter Novak, ‘ says Walter Horowitz, the former
United States Ambassador to Russia. ‘Now he’s become a player and a major one.
He’s very much his own man. He gets in there and does it, and he has very little
patience with government. He’s the only private citizen who has his own foreign
policy—and who can implement it.’ Horowitz voices a perspective that seems
increasingly common in the foreign-policy establishment: that governments no
longer have the resources or the will to execute certain kinds of initiatives,
and that this vacuum is being filled by private-sector potentates like Peter
Novak.
The U.N. Under Secretary-General for Political and Security Council Affairs,
Jaako Torvalds, says, ‘It’s like working with a friendly, peaceable, independent
entity, if not a government. At the U.N., we try to coordinate our approach to
troubled regions with Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia—and with Peter
Novak.’
In Newsweek, similar tributes echoed:
What sets the Magyar mogul apart? Start with his immense sense of assurance, an
absolute certainty that you see in both his bearing and his speech. “I don’t
deal with affairs of state for the thrill of it,” says Novak, whose exquisitely
tailored wardrobe doesn’t distract from his physical vigor. Yet by now he has
matched himself against the world markets and won so frequently that the game
must not feel like much of a challenge. Helping rebuild civil society in
unstable regions such as Bosnia or the Central Asian republics, however,
provides as much challenge as any man could hope for, even Peter Novak.
Hours later, he heard quiet footsteps, bare feet on terra-cotta tile. The woman,
wearing a terry-cotton robe, had finally emerged from the bedroom. Janson stood
up, his head still a blur of names and dates, a fog of facts as yet undistilled
into the urgent truths he sought.
“Pretty swank place,” she said.
Janson was grateful for the interruption. “Three centuries ago, there was a
mountainside monastery here. Almost all of it was destroyed, then overgrown by
the forest. My friend bought the property and sank a lot of money into turning
the remnants into a cottage.”
For Janson, what appealed wasn’t so much the house as the location, rustic and
isolated. Through the front windows, a craggy mountain peak was visible, rising
from the nearby forest. Streaks of gray, naked stone interrupted its green
textures—the distance made the trees look like clinging moss—and the whole was
outlined against the azure sky, where small black birds wheeled and circled and
plunged, their movements coordinated but seemingly aimless. An iron pergola,
draped in vines, stood in the back not far from a centuries-old campanile, one
of the few vestiges of the old monastery.
“Where I come from,” she said, “this isn’t a cottage.”
“Well, he discovered a lot of frescoes in the course of renovation. He also
installed a number of trompe l’oeil paintings taken from other villas. Went a
little wild with the ceiling art.”
“Damn bat babies got into my dreams.”
“They’re meant to be little angels. Think of them that way. It’s more soothing.”
“Who’s this friend anyway?”